Posted
by
msmash
on Monday March 14, 2016 @01:40PM
from the red-in-tooth-and-claw dept.

An anonymous reader shares an update on Google's ongoing battle with Russian regulators: Google suffered a major blow in Russia on Monday, after the Moscow Arbitration court sided with an earlier ruling that Google had violated the country's anti-trust rules by having its apps and services bundled on Android smartphones. Yandex, a Russia-based search engine, last year sued Google over "anti-competitive practices," saying that Google was abusing its dominant position in the market to hurt competition. In response, Google had noted that Android, which roughly owns 80 percent of the market, is a free and open source operating system. At the time, the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) ruled that Android users must not be catered with Google's homegrown apps and services. The Moscow's Arbitration Court ruling said on Monday that it fully supports the earlier FAS decision. According to an Ars Technica report, "Google will now be required to change its business practices with smartphone makers in Russia, or else face a fine if it fails to adhere to the ruling."

OEM's, Users, corporates etc etc had full power to replace Internet Explorer and distribute whatever the hell they wanted. You don't need OSS to have choice, conversely you don't need to be a closed source system to restrict choice and options.

To be fair https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]. All indications are people are fully aware of the google store and what is available. For Yandex to be default is something Yandex needs to negotiate with phone sellers and Russian Telecoms rather than with Google. Likely if the Russian government wants change, they need to produce a Government internet search engine based around publicly defined algorithms and make it the legal default, likely all countries should do pretty much the same thing. The huge bias i

The exact same thing could have been said for chrome and firefox and opera et al in the EU. Any of them could have negotiated deals with OEM's or stores to ship their browser as the default. Basically this is an identical situation to the MS one and the government are acting in a similar fashion, it is not up to government to set the standard, it is there responsibility to police those that are abusing their position.

having said that I think both this case and the anti trust cases against MS were and are

Agreed... while I think the court is correct (Android is a de facto monopoly in many countries and Google isn't shy about leveraging it to push their other services), this decision falls in the "even a stopped clock" category.

Of course, I'm sure the bribe..err..fine will be low enough that Google won't actually have to change anything.

The thing is, in a country like Thailand, Google can just say: "OK, we're complying with your ruling and turning off all services". And in a day or two the ruling will be reversed once people stop being able to look their favorite YouTube videos and read their email.

However, there are homegrown replacements for pretty much all of the Google tools in Russia. Yandex has (quite decent) search, maps (including street view), email, calendaring and so on.

I don't think it even fits into the stopped clock thing to be honest. It's easy to install third party app stores or bypass the Play Store to install apps, it's perfectly legal to fork Android, and Google, as the principle developer of the project, does actually get some rights from having that status.

There's no mandate that forces companies to sign with Google. Amazon would be delighted for mobile phone makers to partner with it. Google is, for better or worse, what people actually want.

Part of the issue, as I understand it, is it's sort of an "all or nothing" arrangement.

If I'm selling Android phones, I can't pre-install Google Maps without also installing Google's Search Bar and various other Google apps. So if I want to install Google Maps and install Yandex's Search Bar, I'm SOL.

What search bar? You mean the one found in Google's stock launcher? Hardly any OEMs actually use that. Google does pay them commissions for searches done in their own launchers (and other apps) though, which is why their launchers might have a search bar, but there isn't a requirement for it to be there. HTC M9 doesn't have one, for example.

As for Google Maps and Play Services, Android would break if they weren't present. For example, I use Endomondo to track my cycling, and Endomondo uses the Google Maps A

That might be true, I haven't used the stock launcher in a long time. However last time I did, it was present. They didn't have it in the Google Now launcher (if you swiped far left you'd see a search though) which I think may be the default launcher for Nexus devices these days. I'm not sure though because the first thing I do is install Nova launcher and have it pull all of my layout settings from google drive. There isn't a google search bar to be found anywhere on my phone.

How is an open source project a defacto monopoly? By it's nature it has no market power.

Google services are a defacto monopoly. People don't give a shit about Android underneath and the vast majority of handset vendors customise the shit out of it to the point where in some cases it's barely recognisable. Monopoly is attributed to Google Play services and that alone. But that's what people pay for so it makes no sense to unbundle it anymore than the request for Apple to sell a handset without the App Store

Agreed... while I think the court is correct (Android is a de facto monopoly in many countries and Google isn't shy about leveraging it to push their other services), this decision falls in the "even a stopped clock" category.

Of course, I'm sure the bribe..err..fine will be low enough that Google won't actually have to change anything.

Depends on who owns the Russian-based search engine that opened the charges against Google in the first place.

What annoys me about Google is that whatever you're using today may be gone tomorrow.

I checked Google Answer's and here's the GOOG-411 - you're completely wrong. A friend of mine just Google Wave's me that he was thinking about moving his pictures from Picnik to Picasa, because as he likes both, he heard on Orkut that the former might get Panoramio integration & he likes that better than Picasa Web Albums. Me? Nah, I don't do much with photos myself, I just keep up with Slashdot via Google Reader and sometimes my iGoogle page - the few photos I sort I can use Google Desktop to manage

I think these quasi-monopolies should all be destroyed and every platform should be forced to be open...

But you know what they say: coordinating OSS is like herding cats. Sometimes dominant companies are needed to form and enforce quasi-standards. I believe there's a happy medium somewhere between an MS-style monopoly and 40 or so OS distros that require too much tinkering to work with existing software and tools.

OSS versus "corporate" sometimes reminds me of "capitalism versus socialism". The best systems seem to be a compromise between the two. The extremes of either end are highly unpleasant (for most).

Yes, I am raining on the idealism parade here, and going yin/yang/balance on you.

That's what many city councils discovered. If all services are run by the council, the government procurement suppliers take over. If all services are run privately, they create a monopoly and the corporations charge what they like. Keep 50% of work in-house and out-source the other 50%, and you get to know what the real costs are, while still having some competition.

Linux is only technically open source. In reality what goes into the kernel is tightly controlled by Torvalds.

GCC is only technically open source. In reality what goes into GCC is tightly controlled by the GCC steering committee.

Open source doesn't mean that everyone gets to control every piece of software. It means anyone can take that software, makes improvements to it, and release new versions without needing approval from the original authors.

and while you are at it stop the fucking carriers and handset makers from changing the damn OS so badly. HTC sense should be an option I have to download, not something shoved down my throat. and the baked in Apps that can not be deleted.... yeah stop that bullshit.

I wouldn't mind bundled apps so much if they could be uninstalled. My phone came with NFL Mobile because Verizon was likely paid money to put that on all of their phones. I don't like football, though, so I disabled it. It's still taking up 750KB, though. Why not let me just delete it if I don't like it/need it at all? I know I could root the phone and then delete it, but you shouldn't need root access to do this.

There are some local makes, like YotaPhone, but virtually all popular smartphones are represented. The iPhone is a cultural icon in Russia. On the Android side, Samsungs are ubiquitous.
My guess is that this applies to foreign phones imported for the Russian market as well as Russian manufactured devices.

So why aren't they going after apple, which is far more closed and restrictive than android? With android you can just get the source and build your own ecosystem on top of it if you want. With iOS, it's their way or the highway. Apple's iphone IS a monopoly, far more than Android ever could be.

For those arguing that Android isn't open, or requires google's strict approval, please explain the hundreds of custom android builds out there - almost none of which sought permission from google.

I don't understand the gripe here... don't most phones come with a bunch of software? And what's stopping users from just picking a different browser from Play? If Yandex is so upset over the unfair competition, why don't they build their own phones and OS?